


People Who Never Were

by Shmiggles



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Australia, Gen, Hermione Granger-centric, Memories, Memory Alteration, Memory Charm | Obliviate (Harry Potter), Memory Related, Minor Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, POV Hermione Granger, Post-Hogwarts, Post-War, Secret Identity, Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:47:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25575292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shmiggles/pseuds/Shmiggles
Summary: Hermione goes to Australia to find her parents, and herself.
Relationships: Mr Granger/Mrs Granger (Harry Potter)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 27





	People Who Never Were

It felt so strange to be back in Beaconsfield. Hermione set on the bench in the park, looking across the street at the house that for so many years she had called home.

She wasn’t sure when it had _stopped_ being home, and that unsettled her.

The house was dark now. No one lived there; it had been empty for months.

Her parents had brought her home from the hospital to this house. Her bedroom, with its view of the back garden, was undoubtedly still filled with her collection of books. The collection filled three bookcases: one for fiction, one for non-fiction, and one for her favourites.

School had been difficult—socially, of course, not academically. The other children had had video games, and had spent countless hours in front of the television. Hermione had had her books, and those from the library, and, on occasion, had fiddled about with her parents’ computer. The other childrens’ parents had taken an interest in their childrens’ worlds; Hermione had taken an interest in her parents’ world.

It didn’t matter. Hermione carried on as before: nose perpetually in a book.

She did well—academically—at Butlers Court School. When the time came, she sat the Eleven-Plus Examination, and well and truly secured her place at the girls’ grammar school. But Hermione Jean Granger did not apply for admission to Beaconsfield High School; her parents’ dentistry practice was doing well—as was to be expected, in a town in the South of Buckinghamshire—and so Hermione was down for Wycombe Abbey instead. A better education, and, more importantly, better connections.

But, of course, Hermione had not attended Wycombe Abbey, for despite the appeal of classes six days per week, a far more exclusive institution had set its sights on Hermione. That, of course, was when things changed forever.

It wasn’t the prospect of boarding school that concerned her parents. David Granger had been at Bedales, and Margaret Granger (or Wilson, as she had been then) had been at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. No, it was this whole _magic_ business that concerned them. The magic itself seemed real enough—Pomona Sprout’s demonstrations were certainly more than convincing—but the school itself, and the kinds of careers that Hermione could seek afterwards, were rather less reassuring. Hermione was to study subjects that her parents had never heard of, try for qualifications that no one they knew of would recognise. The job titles that Professor Sprout suggested were meaningless to them, although prospects of government jobs did mollify them somewhat.

But Hermione would not be convinced otherwise—what eleven-year-old girl would?—and so she caught a train to Scotland and an entirely new life.

Hogwarts taught Hermione magic. It taught her friendship. It taught her bravery. It taught her how to _apply_ ethics.

It taught her to lie.

The Christmas of 1991 had been filled with questions and answers about Hogwarts, Harry and Ron, magic, and her classes. The history of the school, the history of the magical community: these topics were of no less fascinating to her parents than to Hermione herself. There had been no reason to tell them about the troll.

The Easter of 1992 had been much the same.

The Summer of 1992 involved much greater lies of omission. Hermione knew perfectly well that her parents were still unsure about sending her to Hogwarts—they told her as much the last summer, and told her as much this one. Wycombe Abbey had managed to fill her place, but Beaconsfield High School might still take her. So telling them about Harry’s face-to-face encounter with his parents’ murderer seemed rather unwise. Instead, she told them about classes and exam results, about adventures in the grounds and Harry’s prowess on the Quidditch pitch.

There were no awkward lies to tell to old friends, because there were no old friends. Hermione wasn’t disappointed in the least.

There were books to read, both magical and Muggle. There were letters to Ron and Harry. There were replies from Ron.

There was a letter from Ron announcing Harry’s rescue from Little Whinging, and an explanation for Harry’s lack of replies.

Her parents were very interested in Hermione’s friends—she’d never had any before—so _not_ having a joint shopping trip to Diagon Alley was simply out of the question. Harry had made a good impression; the Weasleys not so much. Mr. Weasley had unnerved them with his enthusiasm for what was—to them—the perfectly ordinary, and of course the altercation in Flourish and Blotts was precisely that. That evening, as Hermione lay in bed, waiting to drift off to sleep, she heard her parents talking about the Weasleys: perfectly nice, of course, but with too many children for their means.

Harry and Ron’s arrival at Hogwarts caused Hermione consternation, but was quickly overshadowed by the growing number of petrified students. Hermione recovered to discover a flurry of correspondence from her parents, demanding information, and these demands were not abated by her return to Beaconsfield for the summer. Hermione’s hasty lie about a contagious disease in the school that could only be caught once like chicken pox managed to make the matter entirely opaque to her parents.

Hermione’s third year at Hogwarts brought further challenges. She’d told her parents that she’d taken the most academic combination of electives that she could, but neglected to tell them what that really meant. Concerned letters arrived thick and fast from Beaconsfield: Hermione was having trouble keeping track of when she’d written to her parents, and what anecdotes she’d told. She started to keep a folder with a dated copy of each letter, and lists of what subjects she was going to tell them about and which ones to hide under the carpet.

Needless to say, Sirius Black never appeared in these letters; his existence was a passing comment in the car home from King’s Cross.

Fourth year brought different challenges. One letter home brought a swift response from her father, telling Hermione that she was far too young to be romantically involved with young men, especially internationally-famous athletes. Most of Hermione’s letters thereafter were addressed solely to her mother.

Harry’s trials as the fourth Triwizard Champion were relegated to censored and abbreviated comments in Hermione’s correspondence. These things might not have been happening to Hermione, but they were happening in her school, and she didn’t want her parents to worry.

The return of Voldemort was something that she had to tell her parents. This led to a long conversation, because Hermione had forgotten that she had never told her parents how or why Harry had been orphaned in the first place. It was a conversation that affirmed her fear that her parents would try to pull her back to the world they knew, despite Hermione having neglected to mention Voldemort’s beliefs about her blood status. The mere existence of magical murderers was enough to scare them.

The lies of omission mounted through Hermione’s fifth year at Hogwarts. Umbridge and the Inquisitorial Squad never rated a mention; Dumbledore’s Army was just the revision group that it had originally been intended to be.

Hermione’s injuries from the Battle of the Department of Mysteries were explained away with a tale about an accident in an obstacle course for the Defence Against the Dark Arts exam—a little inspiration from Professor Lupin couldn’t hurt.

There were many more letters home during Hermione’s sixth year, and many soothing replies from her mother. The little ploy with Cormac McLaggen had been a poor decision, and watching Ron cavorting with Lavender had had Hermione on the verge of despair.

The entire year was an entire disaster, but so was the summer that followed.

Hermione’s heart beat heavily inside her ribcage as she entered the house in Beaconsfield at the start of the Final Summer. Over the past six years, Hermione had immersed herself in another world, and grown further and further apart from her parents. Whatever was coming, she knew, would be more than she had ever experienced before. She felt sure that it would change her more than anything else.

Her parents knew that something was wrong, that Hermione was up to something, but they didn’t ask.

She’d spent the quiet train journey to King’s Cross working out her plan, and now it was time to put it into action. It was risky, demanding magic that Hermione had never attempted, but it was necessary.

On her first morning back in Beaconsfield, Hermione went for a walk through the cemetery of St Mary and All Saints Church. As she ambled amongst the headstones, she looked at the names, and their dates. Four years before her father was born, a boy named Wendell Wilkins had been born, but he had died just two years later. Three years before Wendell’s birth, a girl named Monica O’Leary had died on the day of her birth.

Wendell and Monica’s details, along with photographs of Hermione’s parents, and a _Geminio_ ed copy of the Drs Granger’s marriage licence (with the details changed to show Wendell and Monica Wilkins’), were sent off to the Home Office, and 8 days later two passports in the names of Wendell and Monica Wilkins were pushed through the Grangers’ letterbox, and collected and hidden away by Hermione. Once she had those, it was another 12 days until the visas arrived from the Australian Department of Immigration.

During those two weeks, Hermione’s parents worked at their dental practice each day, while Hermione found herself commuting to Australia. After the second day, Hermione was used to the International Apparation Chambers, with their uniquely patterned walls, as documented in the _International Apparation Guidebook_ (16 sickles). After the third day, Hermione had memorised the sequence of cities: London, Paris, Rome, Athens, Alexandria, Damascus, Babylon, Kabul, Delhi, Kolkata, Bangkok, Singapore, Denpasar, Darwin, Alice Springs, Bourke, Sydney. She looked around the city for dental practices to buy and homes to rent. Having found a nice house overlooking Curl Curl beach and a strong practice in Brookvale, Hermione went through her parents’ computer in search of their financial details and bought the business and rented the house over the Internet. Then, it was simply a matter of discreetly engaging the services of some international removalists, before the Big Step.

The wine bottles had been fished out of the recycling bin, thoroughly cleaned, and charmed to be unbreakable. Hermione wasn’t sure whether traces of wine would contaminate her intended contents, but there was no room for risk-taking here. She sat on her bed as the last traces of the summer sun gave way to night, and waited until her parents were asleep. At two o’clock, she decided that it was safe, and crept across the hallway. She stood at the foot of her parents’ bed, pointed her wand at her father, and said, ‘ _Obliviate_.’

It took an hour, to pull all the memories of Hermione, all the memories of his real identity, from his head, and pour them into the bottle labelled ‘Dad’. Memories that could be modified were copied into the bottle, and then changed so that David Granger had always been Wendell Wilkins.

It took another hour for Margaret Granger to disappear into the bottle labelled ‘Mum’, and for Monica Wilkins to be created in her place.

The two bottles were carefully—reverentially—placed in Hermione’s beaded bag. Then, she went into the study, and went through the family photo albums, removing any photographs that showed herself. The documents in the study underwent a similar treatment. A few more charms had clothes flying into suitcases while their owners slept, and everything else packing itself into cardboard boxes, ready for the removalists.

Everything was ready, except for Hermione herself.

As the sun rose, Hermione wandered the house she’d grown up in, wondering whether she’d ever see it again; wondering whether it would still be here when the war was over, whether her parents would still walk this Earth, whether _Hermione_ would survive the war, whether the war would even be won.

She heard a stirring from upstairs.

In the early dawn, Hermione left her childhood home, beaded bag on her shoulder, and walked to the town centre. A letter addressed to her parents’ receptionist disappeared into the inky depths of a red post box. Then, with a twirl and a resounding _crack_ , Hermione Granger was gone from Beaconsfield.

For the people of Beaconsfield, David, Margaret and Hermione Granger now only existed in memory.

As she sat outside, the cold, empty, untouched house, Hermione wondered about an alternate Hermione, who had never received a letter from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, who had toddled off to Wycombe Abbey. Surrounded by the daughters of professionals and the aristocracy, she would surely have pushed herself to ever greater academic feats—but never, of course, would have dreamed of taking _every_ elective subject on offer. Doubtless she would have left the school with a raft of top-notch G.C.S.E.s and A-Levels, and headed off to Oxford or Cambridge or Durham or St. Andrews, to study law or P.P.E. or something, and try to change the world. She would have found a cause in something like domestic violence, sexual slavery, or wage theft, or become a Labour frontbencher. She wouldn’t have met Ron or Harry. Would she have made friends at all at Wycombe Abbey? For a while, it seemed that she wasn’t going to make any at Hogwarts. There certainly wouldn’t have been any trolls to be rescued from at Wycombe.

As she sat on the park bench, Hermione began to cry. She cried for the Hermione who didn’t get to exist. She cried for the Hermione who _did_ exist, who had been through so much in just seven years. She cried for David and Margaret Granger, gone and lost. She cried for Wendell and Monica Wilkins, whom she had called into existence, and whom she would soon—hopefully—banish back into non-existence.

Hermione cried, for what to her seemed to be hours.

But then she stopped. There was work to be done.

* * *

Hermione was still slightly dizzy as she stepped out of the International Apparition Chamber and onto Sydney’s Cumberland Street. Apparating so far, so many times, in a little over an hour had drained her, so she leant against the wall of a backpackers’ hostel and blinked in the wintry Australian sunshine to compose herself.

She shifted the beaded bag on her shoulder, pulling it tighter, and set off through The Rocks. It took her a few minutes to make her way out from the narrow streets—the old buildings, from the colonial port town’s original slum, huddled on the narrow, winding streets, made for a perfect neighbourhood for Sydney’s magical community to hide itself—and out into the hustle and bustle of Wynyard. Muggles—perfectly ordinary human beings, just like Hermione so nearly had become—rushed about in their suits from skyscraper to skyscraper for mid-morning meetings, but Hermione ambled between them, in no particular hurry to reach her destination. She waited patiently for a queue of three blue, white and red buses to make their way off the Harbour Bridge and grumble on to Wynyard Park before crossing York Street.

As she made her way down to Kent Street, Hermione watched the Muggles around her. She wondered how confident they were in their knowledge of the world, of the rules by which that world operated. It struck Hermione that there was so much that they knew that she didn’t. She’d lost count of the number of times that her father had muttered disapprovingly at not learning subjects like physics or geography, but Hermione had never—until now—considered the body of knowledge that those subjects represented. She hadn’t neglected to read about the world she’d left behind, but little things, like how Dad could tell whether a cloud carried rain just by looking at it, or how batteries produced electricity, were things that Hermione was alone in this throng in not knowing.

For a young woman like Hermione, who, for much of her life, had defined herself by her knowledge, to the exclusion of nearly everything else, it was a shock of the sort that would embark her on an existential crisis. Hermione was only just rescued from this crisis by the arrival of her bus, and the attendant need to fiddle with Australian coins to get the right fare—to the disgruntlement of the other passengers—navigate the narrow aisle to find a seat, and to ignore the faint but persistent odour of urine and sweat.

Hermione looked out through the grimy windows at the passing buildings, all glass and steel and polished stone. The magical world had been perplexingly dynamic to her, a far cry from the calm, even rhythms of her life in primary school. But that change, from static to dynamic; was it a consequence of Hermione’s transition between societies, from mundane to magical; or was it attributable to a different transition, from primary school to secondary school, from living at home to boarding school, from childhood to adolescence?

As the bus rattled its way across the famous bridge, Hermione realised that the question had no answer, or, at least, no way of determining an answer. It was a matter of comparing two sets of experiences, and there was no person alive who had lived both lives.

The bus struggled up the hill of the motorway and onto a busy main road, lined with shops. Many of the buildings were late Victorian or Edwardian; positively ancient by the standards of the Commonwealth of Australia. By the standards of Britain, they were practically contemporary; by the standards of the magical Britain, they were futuristic.

The bus turned, continuing along the same main road. The shops gave way to concrete blocks of flats; their brutalist architecture stirred something in Hermione’s memory. The Grangers had been united in their dislike for the style. Hermione’s mother had been the most scathing, calling them a denial of the skill of the builder.

The road began to twist and turn, down towards a waterway. At the bottom, the traffic formed a queue, waiting for a drawbridge to close. As she waited, Hermione looked across the park to a small beach on the riverside. Children paddled in the water while their parents drank wine on the sand. Hermione was reminded of childhood trips to the seaside at Brighton; her father had been much more keen on the outdoors than his wife and child. She wondered whether that character trait persisted in Wendell Wilkins.

The bridge lowered, and the bus struggled up the hill on the other side of the waterway. The houses here were mid-century bungalows, on well-tended but scraggly lawns. Their wide eaves and wider frontages were so different to the ones at home. Hermione wondered what her parents thought of them.

* * *

The beef mince pie burnt her tongue, so Hermione took a swig of water before swallowing it. She could taste that the beef mince was cheap, but there was an endearing tanginess to the rich brown gravy in which it wallowed. The pastry might have been nice earlier in the day, but a morning in the pie warmer had baked it as dry and hard as the sandstone outcrop on which Hermione sat. But it was lunchtime in Sydney, so Hermione thought she ought to have a proper Australian lunch.

Brookvale Park was dominated by some sort of stadium, but there was an open area, shaded by trees, at the back. It was peaceful; Hermione and her meat pie, the slight breeze in the trees above, the occasional call of the birds to one another.

The strident tocsin of a mechanical bell sounded from across the street. After a minute, the sound of teenage boys drifted across to Hermione from the school. The boys’ noise grew louder; Hermione assumed they were playing some sort of game. The playing field was raised up, so Hermione couldn’t see it from the park, but every now and then, one of the boys ran over to the fence to pick up a ball. The boys didn’t look like the boys from Beaconsfield, or the ones at Hogwarts. Their short-sleeved shirts were rumpled and creased, and not tucked into their grey shorts. Their neckties—for the ones who bothered to wear ties—hung limply from unbuttoned collars, the knots swung about on their chests, rather than neatly fixed to their necks.

It’s a state of appearance that Hermione’s childhood in Beaconsfield had taught her to associate with poverty; a sort of disinterested dishevelment. But the Weasleys didn’t look like that, despite their financial situation. It was a state of appearance that Hermione saw in Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew, in the house elves, in Mundungus Fletcher, in the Snatchers, in _herself, Ron and Harry_ over the past few months: it was a state of appearance that Hermione had come to associate with desperation. It was the appearance of someone who was too busy worrying about other things.

Hermione didn’t know why the boys at this Muggle school looked like that. They seemed happy, healthy and carefree; what onerous burden did they carry? Perhaps it was just something that boys did; Harry and Neville had always presented themselves well—Harry as best he could when in Muggle clothes—but Ron, Dean and Seamus had occasionally drawn the attention of the teachers for their presentation. It might have been some sort of defiance of authority, but Hermione couldn’t see what authority could be rebelled against by looking slovenly.

There was a wolf-whistle from the school fence. Hermione looked up to see five boys peering down at her from across the street. ‘Hey, what’s your name?’ one of them asked.

Hermione stood, swung her bag into her shoulder, and walked away. Thank goodness that Ron wasn’t like that.

* * *

Without Harry and Ron, Hermione had fallen back on her instincts for superfluous preparedness. She made walked over to the house, two streets away from Curl Curl Beach, that she’d chosen for Wendell and Monica Wilkins, just to have it fresh in her mind, then went and sat in a park—a different park to the one next to the school. She needed a plan, because there were so many ways that this could go wrong.

There were three separate issues to consider: how Hermione would gain access to her parents; ensuring that her parents’ memories were accurately transferred back into their minds; and ensuring that David and Margaret Granger’s memories would be integrated properly with Wendell and Monica Wilkins’. These issues gave rise to two possible courses of action: explain to her parents the situation before returning their memories to them, or simply entering their house while they were asleep and returning their memories then.

It was a choice of _when_ the conflict would arise. If she spoke to her parents first, they would—quite naturally—be suspicious, and more likely than not, refuse entirely. However, this would ensure that they would wake from the memory restoration with some understanding of what was happening inside their heads.

It took Hermione a surprisingly short time to decide on speaking to her parents first. It would be more difficult for her, but safer for them.

The sun sank below the horizon, and Hermione walked to a kebab shop for her dinner. She sat on a bench at a bus stop, watching the traffic go by, eating from the aluminium foil bag. The smell of the fat dripping into the bag mixed with the musty odour of diesel fumes to create a scent that somehow spoke of adventure to Hermione. She thought of that night on Tottenham Court Road, how they had just escaped from the wedding, and how they were nearly caught by Dolohov.

It was time now. Hermione stood, dropped the foil bag into a rubbish bin, and walked to Wendell and Monica Wilkins’ home. Before, it had seemed cosy and comfortable; now, there was something dark and foreboding about it. Hermione knew that she was stalling; she forced herself to step forwards, to walk up the path to the door, to press the button to ring the doorbell.

Hermione waits. She holds her bag tighter. Somehow her knees don’t shake.

There’s a noise from inside the house. The door opens. Hermione’s mother stands just inside the threshold, looking at her daughter, unrecognising, waiting for Hermione to say something.

Hermione paused, taken aback. She’d thrown herself into the task of retrieving her parents, and hadn’t realised until now that _she hadn’t been sure that her plan had worked at all_ until now. This was the first confirmation she had had that her parents survived the year, that they remained functioning human beings after their memory modification. ‘Hello,’ Hermione said, ‘are you Dr. Wilkins?’

She looked a little taken aback—quite understandably, Hermione thought, given that a stranger had just come to her door and asked for her by name. ‘Yes,’ she said, hesitantly.

‘My name is Hermione Granger,’ Hermione said, before her mother could ask the obvious question. ‘I was wondering whether I could speak to you and your husband; I have something that belongs to you.’ She let her left hand, clutching the drawstring of the bag where it hung over her shoulder, shift, to indicate that the _something_ was inside.

Monica Wilkins hesitated, unsure. After a moment—an agonising moment for Hermione—she nodded, opened the door wider, and smiled slightly, saying, ’You’d better come in, then.’

Hermione smiled and nodded in a gesture of thanks, and followed her mother inside the house that she had chosen, and through the hallway into the living room.

Wendell Wilkins looked up from his book—Churchill’s _History of the English-Speaking Peoples_ , Hermione was able to note just before the cover landed on the coffee table—and then looked inquiringly at his wife.

‘This is—I’m sorry, dear,’ Monica began in answer to her husband’s silent question, but then turned to Hermione.

‘Hermione Granger,’ Hermione filled in, forcing a smile. ‘I’ve come to return something to you.’

Wendell frowned. ‘We haven’t lost anything, have we?’ he asked his wife.

Monica shook her head as she said, ‘I don’t think so.’

They both looked at Hermione with equal measures of curiosity and suspicion.

Hermione decided that while this wasn’t going especially well, it was the best that could be expected. She sat uninvited in an armchair, placed her bag carefully on the floor, and reached into it.

The beaded bag had kept herself, Harry and Ron alive for the best part of a year; it had carried their home—the tent—their food, and most of their possessions. It probably counted as an historical artefact. For the moment, however, it contained little more than two bottles of memories.

Carefully, and with all the reverence they deserved, Hermione retrieved the two wine bottles and placed them gently on the coffee table.

There was a moment’s silence.

‘Two bottles of wine?’ Monica Wilkins asked, clearly having decided that Hermione was up to no good.

‘The tinted glass in the bottles does make it difficult to see,’ Hermione said hurriedly, ‘but if you look closely, you’ll see that it’s not wine in those bottles.

Wendell and Monica Wilkins leaned forwards and peered at the bottles, while Hermione somehow managed not to cry, as she looked at the peeling adhesive labels on the bottles, one reading ‘Mum’, the other reading ‘Dad’.

‘It looks like clouds,’ Wendell said slowly, looking up from the bottle to Hermione. ‘What is it?’

Hermione took a deep breath. ‘Those are. . . memories.’ She paused to gether her nerves. ‘ _Your_ memories.’

She could see her parents about to interrupt and object, so she pressed on. ‘You were in danger, in grave danger of being interrogated, tortured and killed, so I had to remove your memories and make you believe that you were different people so that you would be safe.’

‘You changed our memories,’ Monica asked slowly, ‘and made us believe that we are different people?’

She was using her Calm Voice, the one that she used with children who were scared of visits to the dentist. Hermione was losing them, but there really wasn’t any way of convincing them, was there?

Hermione reached forwards and slowly turned the bottles around, so that her parents could read the labels.

Wendell raised his eyebrows.

‘Yes,’ Monica said, even more slowly. ‘I think I’ll go and make a cup of tea. Would you like one, dear?’ She was standing up very slowly, as though she was too scared to make a sudden move, and spoke with an excruciatingly saccharine voice to Hermione.

Hermione could see the wheels turning in her mother’s head; she was going to the kitchen, so that she could call the police. Hermione could feel her heart beating in her chest.

‘No, thank you,’ she said, and she could hear her voice shaking. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her wand.

Monica Wilkins was standing up now, and slowly backing into the kitchen.

‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ Hermione said, and bit her lip. ‘ _Stupefy_ ,’ she said, and the bolt of red light hit her mother squarely in the chest. A quick cushioning charm made her fall to the carpeted floor a little gentler.

Wendell was now scrambling in outright terror away from Hermione, up the back of the sofa and into the wall. ‘What did you do to her?’ he wailed.

‘She’s going to be fine, she’s just unconscious,’ Hermione said, and she realised that she was crying. ‘You have to be unconscious when I put your memories back.’

Hermione paused to gather herself; she had to concentrate to do this properly. She pointed her wand at her father. _‘Stupefy.’_

Hermione looked at her unconscious parents, and started crying in earnest. It was the first time she’d seen her parents in months, the first she’d known of their survival, and they hadn’t recognised her, and she’d had to attack them without them knowing what was going on, _and it was all Hermione’s fault_.

It took her a good few minutes to pull herself together. She levitated them carefully down the hallway and laid them on their bed, and then just as carefully brought the bottles of memories in with her. She tapped her wand on the cork of the bottle marked ‘Dad’, and guided the memories out of the bottle and into her father’s temple. He stirred slightly as the memories started to flow into his mind, but then frowned slightly and remained unconscious.

Once she was sure that the bottle had been emptied of memories, she placed the bottle back in her bag. It no longer carried its precious contents, but it remained an important object; like the beaded bag, it was a part of history. Hermione made her way around the bed and took the bottle of her mother’s memories from the bag. She removed the cork, and allowed the memories to flow into her mother’s head.

The bottles emptied, Hermione went to the kitchen and started working her way through the jar of tea bags.

* * *

There was a noise from the bedroom.

Hermione raised her head from where her folded arms rested on the dining table and blinked blearily. An empty mug was sitting in front of her, an empty jar sitting next to it.

The sun was shining in through the window. Hermione remembered it rising. She hadn’t slept.

The noise came from the bedroom again. This time, Hermione recognised it as a groan. She forced herself onto her feet and stumbled towards the bedroom.

David Granger—or was he still Wendell Wilkins—was sitting on the side of the bed, looking at his feet, his face creased in confusion. He looked up when he heard Hermione enter.

They looked at each other. Hermione bit her lip in worry.

‘Hermione?’

Hermione nodded slightly. She was terrified.

‘Who. . . who am I?’ He looked up at his daughter, her terror on his face. ‘I’m so confused.’

‘David Granger,’ Hermione said. ‘Your name is David Granger.’

‘But I have all these memories. . . of Wendell Wilkins.’

* * *

Hermione flipped the bacon over, while her parents nursed mugs of tea at the table. None of them had spoken for several minutes. David and Margaret Granger sat in a daze, thinking, processing, organising the two sets of memories that they had.

Hermione slid the bacon and eggs from the pan onto three plates, and set them down on the table. It took a few moments for her parents to react. The shared eye contact communicated a slice of gratitude, buried under a mountain of confusion. Slowly, the three of them began to eat.

Hermione was a bundle of nervous exhaustion. She was exhausted because she hadn’t slept. She was nervous, because she was waiting for the confusion to turn to anger.

‘Why didn’t you tell us what you were going to do?’ her mother finally asked.

Hermione turned around to look at her. ‘What would you have said if I had asked?’

There was a heavy silence.

‘We’d have said no,’ Margaret Granger whispered.

Hermione nodded and turned back to the bacon.

‘Is that it?’ her father demanded.

‘Is that what?’ Hermione shot back as she started to transfer the bacon and fried eggs to three plates.

‘You decided to _remove our memories of who we are_ by yourself, without consulting us, because you thought it was a good idea?’

Hermione put her parents’ plates down on the table with more force than was strictly necessary. ‘Yes,’ she said shortly.

‘That’s not how we raised you,’ he said. ‘What have they been teaching you at that school?’

‘Magic,’ Hermione said through gritted teeth, ‘and friendship, and courage, and bravery.’ She slammed her own plate down onto the table, but didn’t sit.

‘Courage?’ her father asked. ‘That’s what you call mucking about in _your own parents’_ memories, is it?’

Hermione’s eyes flashed with rage. With a shaking hand, she unbuttoned the cuff of her blouse and slid the sleeve up to reveal the angry, red scars that were forming where Bellatrix Lestrange had carved the word ’Mudblood’. ‘I went to war,’ she said, her voice low, deep and slow. ‘I went to war to fight for justice and freedom, the values that _you taught me_. I was captured, and I was _tortured_. I barely survived. How would you have done if they had got to you?’

There was another tense pause.

‘Lets. . . let’s just eat, shall we?’ Hermione’s mother asked.

* * *

‘Who are Wendell and Monica Wilkins?’ Margaret Granger asked.

‘Hmmm?’ Hermione raised her eyes and struggled to focus on her mother. She had been drifting off on the sofa.

‘The names, dear. Where did you get them?’

‘The cemetery in Beaconsfield,’ Hermione said sleepily.

‘That’s how they do it in the spy novels,’ her father said, returning from the toilet.

‘It works in the real world, too.’

‘Well, at least you learnt _something_ from us.’

Margaret glared at her husband. It took a moment, but the look in his eyes softened, if only a little.

Margaret sighed slightly and looked out of the window. Hermione closed her eyes and waited for sleep to take her.

‘Beaconsfield,’ Margaret said.

‘Hmm?’ Hermione asked.

‘We used to live in Beaconsfield, didn’t we?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ David said.

‘Is our house. . .’

Hermione wasn’t sure what her mother’s specific question was, but she knew what it was in general. ‘I made you think that you sold it,’ she said, ‘but you still own it. Everything’s still there. It’s fine—I went there yesterday.’

‘So we can go back.’

‘Yes.’

Her father was looking at Hermione with a strange expression on his face. ‘You put a lot of thought into this, didn’t you?’ he asked.

Hermione drew herself up and looked him in the eye. ‘I might be a witch, but I’m still your daughter.’

Her words hung heavy in the air. The silence spun out for several moments.

A shrill chirping sound filled the room. The telephone was ringing.

Margaret looked at her watch. ‘Goodness, it’s a quarter to nine!’ she said. ‘It’ll be Annaliese!’

Hermione watched her father stumble into the kitchen to answer the ’phone while her mother hurriedly explained that Annaliese was their receptionist. Hermione realised that it was a Thursday. She ought to have waited until the weekend to do this—too late now.

A few moments later, her father returned. ‘I told Annaliese that we’ve had a problem with the plumbing, but we’ll be in as soon as possible.’

* * *

While her parents were at work, Hermione spent the day outside. She walked along the top of some cliffs, along a beach, across the mouth of a lagoon, around a golf course, along more beaches, over headlands, and into a fish and chip shop for lunch.

She sat on the foreshore, beneath some sort of pine tree, and ate the fish, realising that it was exactly the same as she’d enjoyed back home in Beaconsfield. The chips, on the other hand, were different. At home, they were sprinkled with salt and doused with vinegar, but here, they were covered in some yellow powder called ‘chicken salt’.

Some things were the same. Some things were different.

* * *

Hermione blinked and peered up at her mother’s face. Margaret Granger had just woken her daughter from her slumber on the sofa.

‘Dinner time,’ she said softly.

Hermione nodded and sat up. She hadn’t intended to nap for this long, but that wasn’t entirely within her control, given that she hadn’t slept at all during the previous night.

She stretched her aching limbs, and went and sat down at the dinner table. Her parents, and the plates, were waiting patiently.

The small family began to eat in companionable silence. The sausages were beef, not pork.

‘So, Hermione,’ her father said, ‘this war—’

‘David, we _spoke_ about this.’

‘I’m not interrogating her, Margaret, I’m asking; if Hermione doesn’t want to talk about it—’

‘It’s fine,’

Hermione said, heading off what looked to be a heated debate. ‘I think—I think I need to talk about it.’

She told them about the founders of Hogwarts, and the beginnings of the school. The qualities the founders prized, the houses. Slytherin’s emphasis on blood purity, the Chamber of Secrets. The Statute of Secrecy, the rise of belief in magical supremacy. The Peverell brothers and their artefacts. Dumbledore and Grindelwald, and the ensuing war. The end of the Gaunts and the birth of Tom Riddle. A childhood in an orphanage, an escape to Hogwarts, and the discovery of Tom Riddle’s ancestry. The first opening of the Chamber of Secrets, and the death of Moaning Myrtle. Riddle’s interest in Horcruxes, and the end of his muggle ancestors. Riddle’s recruitment of the Knights of Walpurgis and the Horcruxes. The Death Eaters, the Order of the Phoenix, the first war. The Prophecy, the question of the Chosen One’s identity, the deaths of the Potters, the torture of the Longbottoms. Voldemort’s flight to Albania, the trials, the Malfoys’ escape from justice. The Philosopher’s Stone, the second opening of the Chamber of Secrets, the revelation of Sirius Black’s innocence and Pettigrew’s betrayal. The Triwizard Tournament and Voldemort’s resurrection. Malfoys’ hold over Fudge and Fudge’s opposition to Dumbledore. The return of the Death Eaters, and of the Order of the Phoenix. The mental connection between Harry and Voldemort, the Battle of the Department of Mysteries, Fudge’s acknowledgement of Voldemort and resignation. The locket and Dumbledore’s death. The fall of the Ministry, the quest for the Horcruxes, the Battle of Hogwarts.

Hermione realised that over dinner—and a few more hours—she had set out a millennium of history. A millennium of history, culminating in the actions of _herself_ and her friends. What were the chances of Hermione Granger, muggle-born witch, from playing a pivotal rôle in the downfall of Lord Voldemort?

It was clearly a question that had occurred to her parents, too.

‘It had to be Harry,’ her mother said. ‘But why did you have to go too?’

Hermione didn’t know what was driving her mother’s question question: concern for her daughter’s safety, or wondering about the necessity of having her memories altered. But Hermione did know the answer.

‘Because Harry’s my friend, and we’re Gryffindors. We do the right thing, no matter the odds.’

‘And erasing our memories was the right thing to do, was it?’ her father asked.

‘It was a better thing to do than let you be tortured and killed.’

‘But not as good as _letting us choose for ourselves_.’

‘And what choice would you have made? The wrong one! Because you didn’t understand the danger of staying!’

‘Hermione! David!’

Both of them looked at Margaret. ‘You didn’t see eye to eye at breakfast. You’re not going to now. You may not ever. But it doesn’t matter. We—all three of us—are alive. What matters is the future.’

* * *

As Hermione lay in a guest bed that night, she wasn’t sure that her mother was right. How Hermione achieved her goals was just as important as the goals themselves, because every goal was simply the path to another goal. If she had been fighting for freedom, how was she entitled to deny her parents’ freedom of choice?

A phrase came back to her from the recesses of her memory: _informed consent_. The Society for the Protection of Elvish Welfare seemed to be from a different lifetime.

The idea still didn’t feel right. Hermione sat up, and pulled the curtain back enough to see the full moon shining down from the cloudless sky. It was upside down.

* * *

Just a few hours ago, it had been Saturday morning, but now it was Friday night. Hermione was back in Beaconsfield, standing in the kitchen that she had known for so long.

She’d removed all of the protective charms from the house, and done a few spells to clear away the dust. She was tired from having Apparated halfway around the world, so she climbed the stairs to go to bed.

Her bedroom was unchanged since she was eleven. Until then, it had been her refuge from the world; after, it had been the place where she stayed until she could go back to Hogwarts or the Burrow. It had been so important to her before, but then it faded into meaninglessness. The furniture was white— _English houses are small and cramped, so light-coloured furnishings are best, because they make the room appear larger_ —and somehow childlike. The desk and the carpet beneath it were worn; the carpet in front of the wardrobe was only lightly crushed; the wardrobe itself contained utilitarian clothes: nothing for impressing boys in there. The room spoke of Hermione, but Hermione did not speak of it.

The past determines the present, but the future is not limited by the past.

The alternative Hermiones were interesting to think about—Muggle Hermione, Ravenclaw Hermione, Hermione who didn’t go to war, Hermione who didn’t modify her parents’ memories—but only because they could inform real Hermione’s decisions. _Which Hermione do you want to be? Choose wisely, for you may only choose once._

Her life was partly governed by her past decisions, and the rest by whatever the universe threw at her. It was up to Hermione to make the best of it. All that Hermione could do was make the best decisions she could.

Her parents were still in Australia, but they were trying to sell the dental practice. They’d be home soon: within months.

As Hermione slid into bed, she decided that in the morning, she’d go to the Burrow to visit Ron. And Harry, and the rest of the Weasleys.

All was not well, but it would be, soon.


End file.
